Anaheim City School District trustee Jose Moreno was the lead plaintiff in ACLU litigation seeking to force the adoption of by-district council elections in Anaheim (and it should be noted Moreno demanded it be done without a vote of the people and while simultaneously side-stepping adopting by-district election in ACSD).
He has been a vocal critic of the council majority and one of Mayor Tom Tait’s political wing-men; for example, recently crashing a West Anaheim Neighborhood Development Council forum on by-district elections featuring Tait and Councilwoman Lucille Kring to harangue (along with Cynthia Ward) Ms. Kring.
Given his political ambitions, the persistent speculation that he will run for Anaheim City Council this November (particularly as part of a “Tait Slate” of candidates) is natural. Yesterday, I heard from a reliable to source that Moreno is telling others that he is definitely going to run for city council instead of re-election to the school board.
Moreno first made it onto the school due to the fact that the number of candidates match the number of seats that were up, and so no election was held. Since then, he has won re-election with the support of the teacher’s union. However, he has lost that support over the issue of GOALS Academy’s charter school application. Mayor Tom Tait is a major supporter of GOALS, and Moreno ultimately voted in favor of the application (a vote for which I applaud him; even a broken clock is right twice a day). The teachers union instead endorsed incumbent ACSD Board member Jeff Cole and Ryan Ruelas, a teachers union activist who sits on the CTA State Council.
Several Anaheim political observers have advanced the belief that Moreno’s ACSD colleague, James Vanderbilt, won’t run at the end of the day, and that Moreno will take his spot on the Tait Slate. I did’t buy into this view. It seemed to me Vanderbilt was already too far down this road: he had formed a committee, was making the rounds with Tait at the OC GOP Flag Day dinner, signed the ballot argument against Measure D (changing the mayoral term to two years), and helped fund the anti-D campaign. He even participated in an attempt by the Tait campaign to take over the Anaheim Republican Assembly and depose long-time ARA President Steve Sarkis.
But…
11 days into the filing period, He is the only Anaheim council candidate who has not pulled his nomination papers — every other council and mayoral candidate has done so.
Furthermore, Jose Moreno has not pulled papers to seek re-election, which is odd because such delay by incumbents tempts to other candidates into the fray in the belief there will be an open seat.
During Tuesday night’s big Anaheim Convention Center expansion vote, Vanderbilt was AWOL, but Moreno was on hand to make a public comments period pitch for his vision of a poor Anaheim and a wealthy Anaheim, and characterize Convention Center-related jobs as poverty jobs.
In others, all these factors increasingly point to Moreno running for Anaheim City Council. What would be the impact of a Moreno candidacy?
If it is indeed a Tait Slate swap-out of Moreno-for-Vanderbilt, it would certainly complicate Tait campaign efforts to paint the election as a contest between taxpayer advocates versus special-interest giveaways (a false narrative, by the way). Although he’s a Republican, Vanderbilt would have had a difficult time gaining the OC Republican Party endorsement given a) he’s running against two Republican incumbents and b) he has a history of endorsing Demcocratic candidates – most recently Tom Daly over the Republican Jose “Joe” Moreno in AD69.
Furthermore, if Mayor Tait endorses or supports a left-wing radical like Moreno, it would induce serious cognitive dissonance among OC GOP Central Committee members regarding endorsing Tait’s re-election. [We’ll leave aside, for the time being, the issue of the double-standard that would be on display if the OC GOP endorsed the Republican mayor but refused to endorse the Republican councilmembers].
Moreno’s major vulnerability is his radical politics: “He’s practically a socialist,” one long-time Anaheim politico – a Democrat – told me. Anaheim voters generally prefer centrist or right-of-center candidates, which is why Moreno and a left-wing coalition is working to change the council election structure to a form more likely to elected progressives.
On the other hand, Moreno has stood successfully before Anaheim voters on several ballots as a school board candidate, and the same political coalition working to turn-out voters to cast ballots for by-district elections would try to steer those votes toward Moreno. Plus, Moreno would be one of just two Hispanics on the ballot (assuming Donna Acevedo qualifies), making him the beneficiary of Latino voters for whom ethnic affiliation is an important factor.
We should also note the irony of Moreno running under an at-large system he has denounced as disenfranchising Latino voters. If the system is illegitimate and discriminatory, as he charges, wouldn’t that render his own election illegitimate?
Who knows? At the end of the day, Vanderbilt could carry through with his candidacy and Moreno will postpone his council ambitions in hopes the voters approve by-district elections and run for re-election to the ACSD board instead.
But if Moreno runs, we shall at least see a serious and significant philosophical debate about the appropriate role of government in society and the economy, and the appropriate role of race in representation.
Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that he wants to run now in an at-large system when he has been the champion of districts? What is he afraid of? He should run in the system that he created!
I hope Moreno and Vanderbilt both run. Tait’s Montgomery will have a heck of a time wrangling in her boss (or is it the other way around) when the field gets cluttered.